It is often necessary to remove and replace asbestos floor tile with non-asbestos tile. Typically, the asbestos tile is manually removed by scraping and breaking sections of the tile with a knife and other blade devices, which can cause dangerous asbestos particles to become airborne. Simply forcing or breaking off the asbestos tile by mechanical means is laborious, relatively expensive, inefficient and hazardous to the workers and others within the general environment. In addition, the problem of containing/stacking, shipping and disposing of the hazardous scraps and pieces of waste material produced by the prior art methods is substantial. It is noted that such prior art methods produces numerous asbestos fiber surfaces about each broken-off piece of tile and, consequently, detectable airborne asbestos contamination of the air environment.
Since large quantities of scraps and pieces of tile are more difficult to containerize, transport, and store than uniform originally shaped tile sections, for example, flat square foot tiles, such prior art techniques and removal methods are relatively expensive and wasteful of our limited disposal sites for hazardous materials.